Is Steve Jobs the God of Music?

On the day after he announced the iTunes Store, Steve Jobs sat down for an interview with Esquire. It... Didn't go well.

Originally published in the July 2003 issue. For Andy Langer's current day reflection on this feature. click here.

For twenty-five million Apple users, 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California, is the street address of nirvana. And indeed, when you walk into Apple headquarters, it is a world of wonder, as in, I wonder how they make posters that fucking big? At the center of a giant atrium hangs a poster that makes a typical highway billboard look like a page out of a magazine: impossible to ignore, the size of a basketball court but hanging from the ceiling. In full color, there's a collage of dozens of album covers — from Bing Crosby to Beck, ABBA to Guns N' Roses. And at the bottom, in letters three feet high, is a simple rhetorical question: YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION? Steve Jobs is betting this very house that we do.

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And it is not a crazy bet. Steve Jobs's latest project could very well save music, which needs saving. The formal announcement of the revolution came on a rainy April morning in a San Francisco convention hall. With "The Times They Are A-Changin'" blaring, Jobs came center stage — unshaven, wearing a black knit shirt, jeans with no belt and cuffs rolled up, and a pair of New Balance sneakers. Thanks to an overhead projector, the assembled had the chance to watch Jobs tool around on his Apple workstation. Using the service we'd all gathered to see, he was downloading a disparate batch of music — from John Mayer's "Your Body Is a Wonderland" to Golden Earring's "Radar Love."

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Apple's new iTunes Music Store is the first legal music service to offer Internet downloads from the catalogs of all five major music companies. And the service rejects monthly subscriptions for a less complicated model: Each tune from its two-hundred-thousand-track library costs ninety-nine cents and carries with it liberal rights for duplication and CD burning. For the record companies, the iTunes Music Store might be just the way, after a dismal few years, to finally find sunlight. Having been staggered by the post-Napster wave of file-sharing sites like Kazaa and Grokster, which have literally been stealing their business, the company executives were fresh-scrubbed and in attendance for Jobs's big show. There was Interscope's Jimmy Iovine in his trademark baseball cap, recording-industry lobbyist Hilary Rosen, Tom Whalley from Warner Bros., Doug Morris from Universal, Sylvia Rhone from Elektra. You could almost see the new life in their faces. In fact, when Jobs announced his new position on illegal file-sharing — "It's stealing," he says, "and it's best not to mess with karma" — the VIPs clapped the loudest.

But you might say that Jobs himself has been part of these executives' nightmare scenario, as he has done his part — with the iPod, the change-your-life device that's already at the forefront of the MP3-player business, and Apple's "Rip, Mix, Burn" campaign — to give birth to the ethos of the download, which has nearly spelled their doom. Jobs now says he's hoping that Apple's online music store will again make music an impulse buy. Of course, the thing that's been bleeding the business dry is the fact that a lot of kids — a lot of people — are no longer acquainted with the idea that music is something you buy at all. But enough folks apparently found stuff they liked at the store to give Apple staggering first-day sales of a quarter of a million downloads, and a million in the first week, an indication that maybe this guy is indeed pointing the way to the future.

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One Infinite Loop is a technicolor dream of impossibly green grass and impossibly shimmering glass. Through the glass you can see Jobs walking to fetch his own soup and salad from the cafeteria, just as you also see the oncoming corporate publicist who's there to buy you a cup of coffee and remind you that Jobs is a private man. He isn't likely to discuss his vegetarian diet, she says, or anything else vaguely personal, but "he loves talking about innovation, Apple, and the music industry."

After a few minutes, Jobs is sitting across a conference-room table, looking vital, if a little tired. And since those first-day sales figures aren't in yet, he's playing defense — answering all the damn Monday-morning quarterbacks in both the technology and music businesses who question whether young music fans accustomed to free online music are ready for a revolution you have to pay for. Jobs thinks we want to pay if the service is good; we just haven't found anyone worth handing our money over to until today. In our interview, Jobs speaks more than candidly about his new partners' own subscription-based services, about the divide between music and technology, and about the minds of thieves and fifteen-year-olds, among other things. He is clearly sensitive about his relationships with the major record labels, but then, he's got a lot riding on this.

ESQUIRE: Can we start with the process — with you going to the labels and what kind of early response you got?

STEVE JOBS: When we first talked to them, it was over a year ago. The environment then was a little different than it is today. There was certainly a war declared between the music companies and the technology companies. And our goal was trying to find a way out of this mess. We're not a music company, but we do know how to write software, and we do have twenty-five million of the most amazing customers, who were early adopters of this kind of thing. And we do make iPods, the number-one MP3 player in the U. S. We knew that in order to be successful, we'd have to offer customers a broad range of personal-use rights for the music they purchased. And that's what most of the discussions were about. The music industry was pretty shell-shocked at that point, with Napster and its successors. And music companies are not technology companies any more than technology companies are music companies. They're really different from each other. It's interesting — and because of my experience with Hollywood, I've seen this a lot: The technology companies don't understand creative things at all. Silicon Valley's view of the creative process in Hollywood is a bunch of guys in their young thirties sitting on a couch, drinking beer, and thinking up jokes. Which couldn't be further from the truth. The creative process I've seen for more than a decade now at Pixar is incredibly disciplined and really hard — as hard as any engineering process. But likewise, the creative industries tend to dismiss technology as just something to buy and not understand how hard it is and how creative it can be as well. It's understandable that the music companies that are comprised of people that are successful by making good creative decisions — they have to decide which out of fifty artists is the next hot one, with no data to go from. It's an intuitive process, and that's what they do well when they're successful. They don't understand technology. And when this technology came streaming in and started stealing their business, you could understand how they were a little upset and wanted somebody to blame. So they'd pick out some companies that had very little to do with it and start blaming them.

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ESQ: Were you one of those? Were you wrongly accused with Rip, Mix, Burn?

JOBS: Actually, we weren't really that accused with Rip, Mix, Burn. There was one Hollywood executive that spoke about it on the Senate floor, but other than that, actually, it wasn't that big of a deal. I'd say we're the most creative of the technology companies and definitely the most artist-friendly. Almost everyone in the music business uses a Mac and everyone has an iPod. Even people that don't use computers have somebody load up their iPod for them with songs. ... So when we went to talk to these executives, it was mostly about really discussing the broad personal-use rights we felt we needed to give to users. And at that time they were different than they'd ever considered. And it took a year of discussion before we were able to persuade them. ...

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ESQ: You felt like those rights were what? What would make an Apple customer or an iTunes user happy? The ability to burn as many copies as they could? What were you going for?

JOBS: People equated burning CDs with theft. That's not what burning CDs is. Theft is about acquiring the music from the Internet. You don't have to burn CDs to steal music; you just have to go on Kazaa. Why would you have to burn a CD? That's an extra step. Some people burn a lot of CDs and hand them around the dorm room, but that's not a lot of the theft. Theft is everybody going to Kazaa on their own. Most of burning CDs is people making custom compilations. That's a good thing. They want to listen to the tracks they want in the order they want, and as long as they legally acquire those tracks, that's a good thing. ... So the first thing we had to do was really draw a distinction between burning CDs — a good thing — and theft, not a good thing. People want the right to burn CDs. If you tell people they can't burn CDs of their music, as almost every current legal music service has done, or they can only burn one CD with a track or pay per track per burn extra, nobody is going to go for it. ... And frankly, with those kinds of limitations, you might as well put a huge sign that says KAZAA THIS WAY. Because they're not going to suffer under them. They don't suffer under them if they buy a CD or if they turn into a thief and go to Kazaa. So you're not going to win them over by putting up these limitations.

ESQ: They [the record labels] still hold the cards, do they not, if they hold the music you need to have a service? In other words, they still hold contracts for the music?

JOBS: Contracts for the music?

ESQ: The musicians are under contract with the labels. The labels have the rights to distribute this music, and they're giving you the right to distribute this music for some unspecified term?

JOBS: They're selling us music. We're buying music and reselling it.

ESQ: What's to stop them from saying they want to strengthen their services — their internal services?

JOBS: What internal services?

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ESQ: Whether it's Pressplay or MusicNet?

JOBS: They all admit those are big failures. They understand they don't know how to do that.

ESQ: So right now you're their only and best option.

JOBS: They sell a lot of CDs, too. That's a pretty good option. A $30 billion industry doing that. But we are clearly the first legal online music store that has a chance at working, and I think they're very attuned to that fact. ...

ESQ: They've been characterized in the conventional wisdom as dinosaurs — dumb and slow in reacting to digital media.

JOBS: You use the word "they" a lot — "they" and "them" — and who has power over whom. I don't think that way.

ESQ: Okay?

JOBS: I think that's kind of a primitive way of thinking. We didn't approach it that way at all. We approached it as 'Hey, we all love music.' Talk to the senior guys in the record companies and they all love music, too. ... We love music, and there's a problem. And it's not just their problem. Stealing things is everybody's problem. We own a lot of intellectual property, and we don't like when people steal it. So people are stealing stuff and we're optimists. We believe that 80 percent of the people stealing stuff don't want to be; there's just no legal alternative. So we said, Let's create a legal alternative to this. Everybody wins. Music companies win. The artists win. Apple wins. And the user wins because he gets a better service and doesn't have to be a thief. ...

ESQ: Doesn't there have to be a change in thinking to get that fifteen-year-old to buy the core premise here — paying ninety-nine cents a song?

JOBS: First of all, most people who download music from Kazaa probably wouldn't buy everything they take. So fifteen-year-olds have a certain amount of money, and you'd certainly like them to buy music instead of stealing. So our approach to that is to create a far better product — not to just complain, but to actually go out and compete. ... We have a far superior experience than Kazaa — if you're into music. And for that we charge ninety-nine cents.

ESQ: There's a whole generation that thinks music is free.

JOBS I don't think that's true. I talk to a lot of these kids. They don't think it's free. They know they're stealing music.

ESQ: But is karma enough of a threat?

JOBS: No. Let me try explaining it another way. These kids are using the best product. Until yesterday, Kazaa was the best product. Why is that? Because the minute you get your music over the Internet and experience that instant gratification, there's no going back. ... I don't blame these fifteen-year-old kids. I blame us — for not coming up with a better product that was legal. And so they've been using the best product out there, and what we have to do to compete is make a better product. And I believe people will gravitate to a better product. ...

ESQ: Is that where Apple as a media company comes in? You know, making products for all three levels of the platform — whether it's Rip, Mix, Burn, or what you now call Acquire, Manage, Listen?

JOBS: We're not a media company. We don't own media. We don't own music. We don't own films or television. We're not a media company. We're just Apple.

A few moments later, Steve Jobs reaches over and turns off the tape recorder. He seems uncomfortable talking further about this marriage between music and technology, and about his new partners, the record labels. I suggest that we talk instead about what it is that has moved him to get involved in the music business in the first place — I want to know what's on his iPod — but he demurs. No more interview.

"Thanks for coming out to California," he says, extends his hand, and then turns and leaves the room.